JUMP CUTA
REVIEW OF CONTEMPORARY MEDIA

Through
the mid-depression years of 1934 to 1938 Shirley Temple was a phenomenon
of the first magnitude: she led in box-office grosses, single-handedly
revived Fox and influenced its merger with 20th Century, had more products
named after her than any other star, and became as intimately experienced
here and abroad as President Roosevelt. Her significance was then, and
has been ever since, accounted for by an appeal to universals—to her
cuteness, her precocious talents, her appeal to parental love, and so
forth. But one can no more imagine her having precisely the same effect
upon audiences of any other decade of this century than one can imagine
Clint Eastwood and William S. Hart exchanging personas.

One would
not feel impelled to state so tawdry a truism if it were not for the resistance
one anticipates to a serious study of Shirley Temple, and especially to
a study that regards her, in part, as a kind of artifact thrown up by
a unique concatenation of social and economic forces. One anticipates
resistance because Shirley was, first of all, a child (and therefore uncomplex,
innocent of history) and, secondly because the sense of the numinous that
surrounds her is unlike that which surrounds culture heroes or political
leaders in that it is deeply sentimental and somehow purified.

But this
very numinosity, this sense of transcendental and irrational significance,
if we measure it only by its degree, should alert us to the fact that
we are dealing with a highly overdetermined object (in the Freudian sense
of an object affected by more than one determinant). A search for external
determinants, however, initially faces a difficult paradox: there is no
evidence in any of Shirley’s films or in anything contemporaneously written
about her that she was touched by the realities of the depression. For
instance, in the mid-thirties, when twenty million were on relief, Shirley
awoke in the morning singing a song entitled “Early Bird” ; in
the brutally demanding business of film-making, she thought everyone was
playing games; and as for economics, Shirley thought a nickel was worth
more than a dollar.

All of this
would be intimidating if it were not that external determinants often
cannot be perceived in a finished object, whether that determinant be
the repression that produces a pun or the sweated labor that produces
a shirt. And Shirley in film and story was as highly finished an object
as a Christmas tree ornament. Some contemporary libels against her which
depicted her as a thirty-year-old dwarf or as bald headed, and the irreverencies
of critics who called her a “pint-size Duse” or the moppet with
the “slightly sinister repertoire of tricks” show that the surface
was often too perfect to be accepted and that deceit was suspected. But
libels are not theories, and everything written about Shirley was ultimately
helpless to explain her—or to exorcise her.

We might
begin to chip at her surface (analytically, not iconoclastically) by noting
that the industry she worked in was possibly more exposed to influences
emanating from society, and in particular from its economic base, than
any other. To the disruption of production, distribution and consumption
shared by all industries one must add the intense economically determined
ideological pressures that bore upon an industry whose commodities were
emotions and ideas. Politicians directly charged Hollywood with the task
of “cheering Americans up;” and such studio ideologues as Jack
Warner and Louis B. Mayer gloried in their new roles as shapers of public
attitudes. But far more significant pressures arose out of the grim economic
histories of the major studios which saw all of them by 1936 come under
the financial control of either Morgan or Rockefeller financial interests
(F. D. Klingender, Money behind the Screen, 1937). In addition
to rendering films more formulaic and innocuous, is domination drew Hollywood
into a lackeying relation to the most conservative canons of capitalist
ideology. It is not my intention to recount this history, but rather to
assess its effects upon the content of Shirley’s films and her public
persona. To do this systematically I must first survey a portion of the
economic history for the period 1930-1934 and describe the ideology it
gave rise to. At this point my study will move synchronically, from the
economic base through the ideology to Shirley Temple (her first feature
films were made in 1934). I will then hedge on the synchrony by including
films from 1935 and 1936 (on the pretest that Shirley’s films conservatively
repeated situations and themes).

ECONOMICS/
IDEOLOGY

The most
persistent specter that the depression offered to those who had come through
the crash with some or most of their fortunes intact was, as it turned
out, not that of Lenin nor of Mussolini, although articles on Communism
and Fascism filled the magazines, but that of a small child dressed in
welfare clothing, looking, as he was usually depicted, like a gaunt Jackie
Coogan, but unsmiling, unresponsive, pausing to stare through the windows
of cafeterias or grocery stores—his legs noticeably thin and his stomach
slightly swollen. This specter had thousands of incarnations.

“We
were practicing for a chorus and a little boy about twelve years old
was in the front line. He was clean in his overalls, but didn't have
very much on under them. He was standing in the line when all at once
he pitched forward in a dead faint. This was two o'clock in the afternoon
... He had not had anything to eat since the day before.”

“Mrs.
Schmidt took her son Albert, five years old, into the kitchen and turned
on the gas. ‘I don't know what I am going to give the children to eat,’ said a note she had written for her husband. ‘They are already half
starved. I think it best to go into eternity and take little Albert
along.’”

“Five
hundred school children, most with haggard faces and in tattered clothes,
paraded through Chicago’s downtown section ... to demand that the school
system provide them with food.”

“I
love children and have often wanted to have children of my own. But
to have one now, as I am going to, is almost more than I can stand.
I have four step-children, so there are six in my family. I have suffered
so much in the past few years, and have seen my family suffer for even
enough food. I need fruit and milk and vegetables. I need rest. I need
yards of material for shirts and gowns. I have no blankets. I need baby
clothes. I hate charity ... but my condition now forces me not only
to take charity but even to ask for it.”

These children
are, of course, symbolic, both in the context of the depression and of
this article. What they symbolized was the flashpoint of the millions
on relief who showed themselves, early on in the depression, largely immune
to acts of revolt and willing to tough out the hard times if their children’s
minimal needs for food and clothing could be met. In November 1930 Hoover
was forced to reply to the observation by the White House Conference on
Child Health and Protection that six million American children were chronically
undernourished. He said,

“But
that we not be discouraged, let us bear in mind that there are thirty-five
million reasonably normal, cheerful human electrons, radiating joy and
mischief and hope and faith. Their faces are turned toward the light—theirs is the life of great adventure. These are the vivid, romping
everyday children, our own and our neighbors.”

This may
have washed with some at this early stage of the depression, but later
on the tactics had to be more frontal. “No One Is Starving” the New York Times and Herald Tribune announced in front
page headlines on March 17, 1932. This was the substance of telegrams
from thirty-nine governors. The issue of starvation was debated, and many
cases of death by starvation were adduced by newspapers; but the statement,
which begged the issues of chronic malnutrition and near-starvation, was
essentially true. And it was vitally important for those in positions
of wealth and power that it remain essentially true.

To this
end, the most minimal subsistence needs had to be provided. And as the
estimate of those needing help rose, reaching about twenty million on
the eve of the election in 1932, it became increasingly likely that a
federal relief program would have to be inaugurated. But to the captains
of industry and the traditionally wealthy who made up Hoover’s official
and private entourages the prospect of massive federal relief was dismaying.
All of the initial reactions of Hoover and the class he so steadfastly
represented had been self-serving. Tariffs were placed upon foreign imports,
absurdly low income taxes upon the wealthy reduced even further, and federal
reserves hoarded in a miserly fashion or loaned at reduced rates to select
banks and industries. The remedy for the depression, the country was told,
lay in the protection, and where possible the augmentation, of the capital
resources of the wealthy, for these resources were the key to renewed
economic growth and revived employment.

Such naked
opportunism at so desperate an hour had to be dressed in Emperor’s clothes
of the first order. And Hoover and his supporters spent most of their
time spinning and sewing. What they fashioned was a formidable ideological
garment made of the following materials: The economy of the country was
fueled, not by labor, but by money. Those who possessed money would bring
the country out of the depression as their confidence was restored by
a protective and solicitous government. If the needy millions were served
instead, a double blow would be struck at the nation’s strength. First
of all, the capital resources of the government and of the wealthy (who
would have to be taxed) would be depleted. And, secondly, the moral fiber
of those who received relief would be weakened—perhaps beyond repair.

The latter
argument, less amenable to mystification because it was not couched in
financial terms, needed more than assertion to give it weight. Recourse
was therefore made to the deities who dwelled in the deepest recesses
of the capitalist ethos. Initiative, Work and Thrift were summoned forth,
blinking at the light. An accusing finger was pointed at England where
the dole had robbed thousands of any interest in self-help. Hoover’s attacks
upon the evils of relief were echoed at state and local levels; and it
became common to insist that those who received relief, even a single
meal, do some work in compensation, such as sweeping streets. This demeaning,
utterly alienating “work” became one of the most common experiences
of the depression—and one of its scandals.

Early in
the depression William Green, President of the AFL, led organized labor
in denouncing the dole and unemployment insurance as “paternalistic,
demoralizing and destructive.” Governor Roosevelt of New York, thinking
of the votes he would need to get in the White House, asked in Fall of
1931 for an increase in state taxes to give “necessary food, clothing
and shelter” but noted that “under no circumstances shall any
actual money be paid in the form of a dole.” Observed a writer in
The Nation,

“What
an incredible absurdity. What is there about cold cash that makes a
man like Governor Roosevelt think that giving dollar bills to a starving
man or woman is worse for his character than presenting him with a suit
of clothes which he might buy for himself?”

Indeed,
the only ones who seemed to be taken in by the argument that relief destroyed
character were reactionary governors and grim county relief agents.

Clearly
some other ideological weapon was needed, one which could effect material
changes in conditions rather than merely mask the hardened indifference
of the Hoover administration. And one was found, calculatedly developed,
and financed with some of the cold cash that was anathema to the poor.
Declaring that “no one with a spark of sympathy can contemplate unmoved
the possibilities of suffering,” Hoover, late in 1931, appointed
Walter S. Gifford Director of the President’s Organization on Unemployment
Relief and Owen D. Young Chairman of the Committee on Mobilization of
Relief Resources. In their official capacities they took out a series
of full page advertisements in major magazines.

Tonight,
Say This to Your Wife,
Then Look into Her Eyes!

“I
gave a lot more than we had planned. Are you angry?“

If you
should tell her that you merely “contributed”—that you gave
no more than you really felt obligated to—her eyes will tell you nothing.
But deep down in her woman’s heart she will feel just a little disappointed—a tiny bit ashamed.

But tonight—confess to her that you have dug into the very bottom of
your pocket—that you gave perhaps a little more than you
could afford—that you opened not just your purse, but your heart as
well.

In her
eyes you'll see neither reproach nor anger. Trust her to understand
...

It is
true—the world respects the man who lives within his income.
But the world adores the man who gives BEYOND his
income.

No—when
you tell her that you have given somewhat more than you had
planned, you will see no censure in her eyes. But love!

The vulgarity
of this charade can more fully be appreciated if we know that Gifford
was President of A. T. and T. and Young Chairman of the Board of Directors
of General Electric. This attempt to shift the burden of charitable work
to the middle class and the poor was, ironically, unnecessary. As a reporter
observed at a later date,

“In
Philadelphia, as in most other cities, the poor are taking care of the
poor.”

But face-saving
was the order of the day, and to the advertisements and the repeated appeals
to local charities by Hoover, one must add the many Charity Balls, at
one of which debutantes dressed in hobo clothes and dined at red and white
checked tables on cornbread and hotdogs.

Then there
were, of course, the publicized, and the modestly unpublicized, donations
of the wealthy to charity. In March of 1933 when the income tax statistics
for 1931 were finally published a Nation reporter noted, “The results
are startling, even to those who never had much faith in the philanthropy
of the wealthy.” The figures “destroy completely the myth of
the generosity of America’s millionaires.” What they specifically
showed was that contributions were usually of an order that reduced net
taxable income to a favorable level—and no more.

But the
endorsement of charity by those in power made the attacks upon the concept
of welfare more consistent. Early in 1932 the Costigan-LaFollette Bill,
which would have allocated $350 million for aid to local welfare agencies,
was voted down by both parties. A critic noted,

“The
Democrats want to win the next election ... They are constantly currying
favor with big business and entrenched wealth. They will do nothing
to offend Wall Street. ... In the words of the Washington correspondent
of the Federated Press, the Democrats are ‘buying the next election
with the lives of the children of the unemployed.’ “

If the Democrats
hoped to buy it by actively demonstrating their conservatism, Hoover made
his bid by requesting and getting federal relief grants of $300,000,000
just before the 1932 election. Since the number of needy was about 20
million, the grant provided $15 per person per year, or about four cents
per day. But it was doubtful that many were listening to Hoover, because
shortly before he made the request Roosevelt had accepted the nomination
for President with the words:

What do
the people of America want more than anything else? In my mind, two
things: Work; work, with all the moral and spiritual values that go
with work. And with work, a reasonable measure of security ... I say
that the whole primary responsibility for relief rests with localities
now, as ever, yet the Federal Government has always had and still has
a continuing responsibility for the broader public welfare. It will
soon fulfill that responsibility.

The ominous
sound of the whole passage seemed to be drowned out in the resonating
final line, “It will soon fulfill that responsibility.” Roosevelt did, of course, act on the issue of unemployment. The NRA, WPA
and CCC produced jobs—at rather pathetic wages—for some. But a distinction
must be made between the creation of a few hundred thousand jobs and the
vast needs of 20 million destitute. When Roosevelt addressed the first
CCC men by radio in July, 1933, he said, “You are evidence that we are seeking to get away, as fast as we
possibly can, from the dole, from soup kitchens and from free lodging.”
And when, a few months later, he signed the Federal Emergency Relief Act
which allocated a token $500,000,000 for grants to states, he implored
citizens to “voluntarily contribute to the pressing needs of welfare
services.” A sense of foreboding gripped at least one reporter:

“Just
why this note should have been sounded when it was hoped the federal
government was about to initiate a bold, vigorous and constructive policy
in relief ... is not easy to understand.”

But it soon
became easier. In October of 1933 Roosevelt addressed the Conference of
Catholic Charities:

“It
is for us to redouble our efforts to care for those who must still depend
upon relief ... Many times I have insisted that every community and
every state must first do their share.”

In January
of 1934 he addressed Congress on the budget:

“The
cornerstone of the foundation is the good credit of the government.
If we maintain the course I have outlined we can look forward to ...
increased volume of business, more general profit, greater employment,
a diminution of relief expenditures, and greater human happiness.”

And, finally,
in an address to NRA authorities in March, 1934:

“The
aim of this whole effort is to restore our rich domestic market by raising
its vast consuming capacity.”

By degrees,
in a purely rhetorical process, relief was demoted in importance, then
mentioned in passing, then forgotten.

But Roosevelt
was not only more politically expedient than Hoover, he was more culpable.
Hoover was insulated from, and insensitive to mass thought and feeling.
He could call children “cheerful human electrons” and think
he would be understood. Roosevelt was a common sentimentalist. At Warm
Springs in Georgia, he helped maintain a hospital for crippled children
(he had suffered from polio himself) which he loved to visit. He also
liked to lecture the children, on one occasion anticipating the thesis
of this article with a bedtime exploration of the relation of economics
to society.

“We
hear much these days of two adjectives—social and economic ... Here
at Warm Springs we have proved that they go hand in hand.”

The proof,
to summarize Roosevelt’s prolix demonstration, lay in the fact that almost
every crippled child required the care of an adult; rehabilitation made
the child a “useful member of society” and released the adult “to be an economically useful unit in the community.” In another address on the occasion of his birthday and the holding of
over 6000 birthday balls to raise funds for Warm Springs, Roosevelt said,

“Let
us well remember that every child and indeed every person who is restored
to useful citizenship is an asset to the country and is enabled to ‘pull
his own weight in the boat.’ In the long run, by helping this work we
are not contributing to charity, but we are contributing to the building
of a sound nation.”

The image
of crippled children compelled to heave at the oars would be monstrous
if it were not so ingenuously political.
One final anecdote. Roosevelt, a former boy scout, was asked to address
the scouts upon the occasion of their twenty-fifth birthday in February,
1934. He asked Harry Hopkins, his relief administrator, for ideas. Hopkins
suggested that the scouts be asked to collect furnishings, bedding and
clothes for those on relief. Roosevelt liked the idea and announced it,
adding,

“Already
I have received offers of co-operation from Governors of States, from
Mayors and other community leaders. I ask you to join with me and the
Eagle Scouts and our President and Chief Scout Executive who are here
with me in the White House in giving again the Scout oath. All stand!
Give the Scout sign! Repeat with me the Scout oath! ‘On my honor ...’” and so forth.

As the second
year of Roosevelt’s administration drew to a close in the winter of 1934,
sufficient federal relief was no longer a serious possibility. Commentators
noted that the impression that the Democrats would act had utterly demoralized
charity efforts. And yet in New York alone there were 354, 000 on relief,
77,000 more than a year before. Relief applications were coming in at
the rate of 1500 a day. One reporter passing through Ohio discovered families
receiving one cent and a half per person. The Nation noted,

“Within
the greatest anthill of the Western Hemisphere the marry has slowed
down. One out of six New Yorkers depends on the dole. One out of three
of the city’s working population is out of work.”

As the days
grew shorter and drier, it became obvious that for millions the hardest
times were still ahead. Those already mentally and physically stunted
by years of malnutrition would know many more years of diminished existence
before the economic boom of World War II would turn the depression around.
And a few parents, broken under the responsibility of caring for hungry,
ill and constantly irritable children, would kill one or more of them—and sometimes themselves. But then, on the other hand, there was Shirley
Temple.

SHIRLEY

Since birth,
Shirley had never awakened at night. She had never been ill, although
her mother seemed to remember “a little cold once.” She refused
to take a bottle and had to be fed with a spoon at three months. She spoke
at six months and walked at thirteen. She arose every morning either singing
or reciting the lines she had memorized for her day’s work. She was a
genius with an I.Q. of 155. She did not mark her books, scrawl on wallpaper
or break her toys. She did not cry, even when physically injured during
the shooting of a scene. Doctors and dentists wrote her mother asking
for the secrets of her diet and hygiene: her mother responded that there
weren't any. Her relations with her parents were totally loving and natural.
She had no concern for, or sense of, herself, and was consequently unspoilable.

If her mother
were not so straightforward a woman, and if there were not independent
corroborators for some of these facts, one would have to presume that
Shirley was not real—that she was a rosy image of childhood projected
like a dialectical adumbration from the pallid bodies and distressed psyches
of millions of depression children. But she was real. Her biographies
are not, as with most Hollywood stars, cosmeticized myths, but something
on the order of fundamentalist “witnessings.”

“The
cameraman tells me that she went through this emotional scene in such
a miraculous way that the crew was spellbound, and when she finished
they just stared fascinated. ‘I wanted to reach out and touch her as
she went by,’ said Tony Ugrin who makes all her still pictures. ‘I could
hardly believe she was real.’”

Shirley’s
relation to the depression history I have outlined goes far beyond this
dialectical play between her biographies and the real childhoods of many
depression children, however. And it is at once easy and difficult to
conceptualize. There is a felt resonance between the persona she assumed
in her films and the ideology of charity that no one can miss. But to
state why it exists demands a theory for her studio’s conscious
or unconscious ideological bias, and the making of distinctions between
intended ideology (propaganda of the Gifford-Young sort), opportunistic
seizing upon current ideas and issues (the “topical” film syndrome),
and a more diffuse attunement to the movie audience’s moods and concerns.
When one takes into account Fox’s financial difficulties in 1934, its
resurgence with Shirley Temple, and its merger with 20th Century under
the guidance of Rockefeller banking interests, one feels that the least
that should be anticipated is a lackeying to the same interests that dominated
Hoover and Roosevelt.

But such
lackeying need not appear as a message or the espousal of a class view;
it can as well operate (and more freely) as a principle of suppression
and obfuscation. Shirley’s films and her biographies do contain messages
of the Gifford-Young sort—one should care for the unfortunate, work
is a happy activity—but they seem more remarkable for what they do not
contain, or contain only in the form of displaced and distorted contents.

I'll assume
that this contention is a viable one and rest the case for it upon the
analysis which follows. But before beginning, a few biographical facts
are needed to place Shirley relative to the history already outlined.
Shirley was born April 28, 1928, six months before the crash. She was
discovered at a dance studio in 1933, given bit parts in shorts, then
graduated to a musical number in Fox’s STAND UP AND CHEER early in 1934.
During the number she pauses for a moment, puckers, leans forward and
blows a little marshmallow kiss past the camera. Audiences emerged from
the experience disoriented and possessive. After another minor role in
CHANGE OF HEART, Shirley was moved up to feature roles in LITTLE MISS
MARKER (Paramount), BABY, TAKE A BOW (Fox), NOW AND FOREVER (Paramount),
and BRIGHT EYES (Fox), all produced in 1934. The box-office grosses made
both studios incredulous. No star of the thirties had affected audiences
so. Fox tied up its property with major contracts and produced nine more
films in the next two years, the period of our concern.

Shirley’s
most intimate connections with the depression history I have traced are
those found in her films. I will deal opportunistically with the details
of these films: what I shall principally omit are Shirley’s functions
as an entertainer—her many dances, songs, exchanges with other cute
children, and so forth. In any given film the sheer quantity of sequences
in which Shirley entertains may make her other functions seem peripheral.
But in the eleven films made between 1934 and 1936 the sequences devoted
to plot and to the development of a persona predominate.

In these
films Shirley is often an orphan or motherless (LITTLE MISS MARKER, BRIGHT
EYES, CURLY TOP, DIMPLES, CAPTAIN JANUARY) or unwanted (OUR LITTLE GIRL).
She is usually identified with a nonworking proletariat made up of the
dispossessed and the outcast (clearly in BABY, TAKE A BOW, LITTLE MISS
MARKER and DIMPLES; more covertly in OUR LITTLE GIRL, NOW AND FOREVER,
and THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL). And when she is of well-to-do origins
(THE LITTLE COLONEL, POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL and THE LITTLEST REBEL) she
shows affinities for servants, blacks and itinerants. Her principal functions
in virtually all of these films are to soften hard hearts (especially
of the wealthy), to intercede on the behalf of others, to effect liaisons
between members of opposed social classes and occasionally to regenerate.

We can detect
some very obvious forms of repression, displacement and condensation at
work within this complex. Although proletarian in association, Shirley
is seldom the daughter of a worker, much less an unemployed one. In the
two films in which her parents are workers (LITTLE MISS MARKER, BRIGHT,
EYES) they are killed before the film begins or during it. Therefore the
fact that the proletariat works is generally suppressed in the
films. What proletarians do to get money is to con people, beg or steal.
This libelous class portrait is softened by comedy and irony, which function,
as they usually do, as displaced attitudes of superiority and prejudice.
A comical proletariat is also a lovable one, opening the way to identification,
and even to charitable feeling.

Shirley’s
acts of softening, interceding and the rest are spontaneous ones, originating
in her love of others. Not only do they function as condensations of all
of the mid-depression schemes for the care of the needy, but they repress
the concepts of duty to give or of a responsibility to share
(income tax, federal spending). The solution Shirley offers is natural:
one opens one’s heart, a la Gifford and Young, and the most implacable
realities alter or disperse. We should also note that Shirley’s love is
of a special order. It is not, like God’s, a universal mana flowing through
all things, but a love that is elicited by need. Shirley turns
like a lodestone toward the flintiest characters in her films—the wizened
wealthy, the defensive unloved, figures of cold authority like Army officers,
and tough criminals. She assaults, penetrates and opens them, making it
possible for them to give of themselves. All of this returns
upon her at times forcing her into situations where she must decide who
needs her most. It is her agon, her calvary, and it brings her
to her most despairing moments. This confluence of needing, giving, of
deciding whose need is greatest also obviously suggests the relief experience.

So strongly
overdetermined is Shirley’s capacity for love that she virtually exists
within it. In Freudian terms she has no id, ego or superego. She is an
unstructured reification of the libido, much as Einstein in popular myth
reified the capacity for thought. Einstein’s brain bulged his forehead,
dwarfed his body and stood his hair on end. Shirley’s capacity for love
drew her into a small, warm ball, curled her hair, dimpled her cheeks
and knees, and set her in perpetual motion—dancing, strutting, beaming,
wheedling, chiding, radiating, kissing. And since her love was indiscriminate,
extending to pinched misers or to common hobos, it was a social, even
a political, force on a par with the idea of democracy or the Constitution.

That all
of this has great ideological potential scarcely needs arguing. But it
would be naive to trace Shirley’s film persona exclusively to an origin
in the policies of the Hoover and Roosevelt administrations. One senses,
rather, that Shirley is a locus at which this and other forces intersect,
including those of the mitigation of reality through fantasy, the exacerbated
emotions relating to insufficiently cared for children, the commonly stated
philosophy of pulling together to whip the depression, and others. Yet
it would seem equally naive to discount the fact that Shirley and her
burden of love appeared at a moment when the official ideology of charity
had reached a final and unyielding form and when the public sources of
charitable support were drying up.

But depression
attitudes toward charity, as we saw earlier, must be understood in terms
of forces emanating from the economic base; and I have so far said nothing
of Shirley’s relation to economics. Here we must move between her films
and her biographies. For our purposes all of this material has the same
status: it simply tells us all that people knew about Shirley. We have
already noted that one of her functions was to pass between needy people—to be orphaned, exchanged, adopted. She always wound up in the possession
of the person who needed her most. And he who possessed her owned the
unique philosopher’s stone of a depressed economy, the stone whose touch
transmuted poverty to abundance, harsh reality to effulgent fantasy, sadness
to vertiginous joy. All of this works as a displacement of the social
uses and the efficacy of money.

If the argument
needs strengthening we do not have to seek far. Shirley’s absolute value
was a constant subject of speculation. The usual figure quoted was ten
million dollars in depression dollars an almost inconceivable sum. As
a writer in the Ladies Home Journal put it in a symptomatic passage,

“When
she was born had no way of knowing that the celestial script called
for him to say, not ‘It’s a girl’ but ‘It’s a gold mine.’”

Her father
was a bank clerk at the time of her discovery (1932) but through his fame
(which could attract deposits) he soon became manager of a posh branch
of the California Bank. This conjunction of a banker and an inestimably
valuable property is in itself suggestive, especially for an era when
bankers like J. P. Morgan symbolized the capitalist system.
It would take too much space to repeat even a sampling of the stories
that concern other white, middle class parents hopes that their child
might prove to be a financial bonanza like Shirley Temple. The following
passage from the Saturday Evening Post will have to epitomize
them:

“The
other studios would like a Shirley too. Her name could be Millicent,
for all they care. They test her. They test little Gertie, too, and
Annabelle. Hundreds of them, thousands of them. No fields are drilled
for oil, no hills are mined for gold with more desperation, more persistence,
more prayers, more hopes. So far, no dice. Maybe you have a little Shirley
in your home. Maybe you don't suspect it. Mr. and Mrs. George Temple
didn't.”

If we add
to all of this Shirley’s function as an asset to the Fox studios, her
golden locks and the value of her name to the producers of Shirley Temp
dolls and other products, the imagery closes in. She is subsumed to that
class of objects which symbolize capitalism’s false democracy: the Comstock
Lode, the Irish Sweepstakes, the legacy from a distant relative. And if
we join her inestimable value with her inability to be shared we discover
a deep resonance with the depression-era notion of what capital was: a
vital force whose efficacy would be destroyed if it was shared. Even Shirley’s
capacity for love is rendered economic by our awareness that Fox duplicated
the Hoover-Roosevelt tactic of espousing compassion for anterior economic
motives (specifically, by making a profit from the spectacle of compassion).
And because of the unique nature of the star-centered movie industry of
the thirties, Shirley was a power for monopoly control of film distribution.

This intricate
nexus of functions and meanings contains enough material for a major study
of how capitalism simultaneously asserts and denies its fetishistic attachment
to money and how it embeds these attitudes in the metaphoric surfaces
of the commodities it creates. Shirley, orphaned, often in poor clothes,
with nothing to give but her love, was paradoxically specular with the
idea of money. And the paradox could as easily be perceived as an oxymoron
in which the terms “need/abundance” were indissolubly fused.
Of course, paradoxes and oxymorons are classical devices for the creation
of numinous effects of the sort I referred to at the beginning of this
article. By the time she had made her first eleven films Shirley’s name
alone gave off little intaglios of energy, like a Saint’s head in a religious
woodcut. A blind man came to the studio and asked to run his hands over
her face. A woman wrote her father asking him to conceive a second Shirley
upon her—or perhaps she upon him. Eleven industries paid Shirley to
produce commodities bearing her name, and several of them grew rich. And
Shirley’s mother drew one thousand dollars a week just to keep her daughter
healthy and functioning and primed for work.

And it is
Shirley’s relation to her work that we must next, and finally, consider,
both because it received constant attention in her biographies and because
it may lead us to fresh insights into her relations to love and to money.
The commonplace that most work under capitalism is alienated seems never
more valid than during those crisis moments known as depressions. Work
during such periods is not only more affected by feelings of personal
insecurity, but by a very real harshening of work conditions. For instance,
millions of workers during the early thirties suffered from one or more
of the following conditions: speed-up, reduced work hours, reduced salaries,
the firing of high salaried employees and the employing of those willing
to work for much less, exposure to deteriorated and dangerous machinery
and a general reduction of safety standards, thought and speech control
so intense in some plants that workers never spoke except to ask or give
instructions, inability to question deductions from paychecks, beatings
by strike-breaking Pinkertons and thugs, and compelled acquiescence to
the searches of their homes by company men looking for stolen articles.
And there were the ultimate forms of alienated work—street cleaning,
mopping a floor, painting a wall in exchange for a meal, often a bowl
of soup and a piece of baker’s stale bread: this was the work that saved
one from the loss of initiative and character. One cannot read far in
the records of any class of workers during the depression without discovering
how abrasive and anxiety-ridden most working experiences were.

None of the biographical articles on Shirley failed to describe her attitudes
toward her work. I will give just two samples. First, from Time:

“Her
work entails no effort. She plays at acting as other small girls play
at dolls. Her training began so long ago that she now absorbs instruction
almost subconsciously. While her director explains how he wants a scene
played, Shirley looks at her feet, apparently thinking of more important
matters. When the take starts, she not only knows her own function but
frequently that of the other actors. She is not sensitive when criticized.
In one morning, Shirley Temple’s crony and hero, Tap Dancer Bill Robinson
... taught her a soft-shoe number, a waltz clog and three tap routines.
She learned them without looking at him, by listening to his feet.”

Second,
from an article written by her mother:

“I
never urged Shirley to go to the studio with me. She wanted to go then,
as she wants to go now. Motion-picture acting is simply part of her
play life. It is untinged with worry about tomorrow or fear of failure.
A few times when we have left the studio together, she has looked up
at me and said, ‘Mommy, did I do all right?’ Since there is no right
or wrong about it, but only Shirley playing, I have replied, noncommittally, ‘All right.’ That was the end of it. ... I do not know whether Shirley
understands the plays in which she appears. We do not discuss plots
or characters, or, indeed, any phase of tier motion-picture work. Her
playing is really play. She learns her lines rapidly, just as any child
learns nursery rhymes or stories. We usually go over the script the
first time with enthusiasm. Sometimes, when it is issued, Shirley cannot
wait until we get home to hear her lines read. ‘Turn on the dashboard
lights,’ she said one night, ‘and read my lines while you drive.’ “

And for
this work, accomplished with joy and ease, Shirley received $10,000 per
week and over 3500 letters thanking tier for the pleasure she gave. The
disparity between Shirley’s work and the reality of most depression working
experiences was ludicrous. And the frequency and consistency of descriptions
of the sort just quoted indicates that the disparity was also mesmerizing,
much like the disclosure in 1932 that J. P. Morgan paid no income taxes.

Shirley’s relation to work adds a further counter to the set already made
up of her relations to love and to money; but does it also establish interrelationships
with them? One is reminded of Marx’s acute observation that money, considered
in its relation to the work that produces it, has a repressive and censoring
role. It shares this role with most commodities, which are designed and
finished so as to conceal traces of the labor that has gone into them.
To clarify the point by example, the lace produced by child labor in Nottingham
in the 1860’s was finished under very exacting standards of quality and
cleanliness, effectively effacing evidence of the hand-labor that produced
it. The well-to-do who bought it could in no palpable way be reminded
of work, or of workers, or the exploitative class structure of their society,
much less be led to inquire into the circumstances that saw up to twenty
children crowded into an airless, fetid, twelve-foot square room, working
under the whip of a mistress for from twelve to sixteen hours a day, with
their shoes removed, even in winter, so the lace would not be soiled.

One might say, then, that Shirley stands in the same relation to work
as does a piece of Nottingham lace or a dollar bill: she censors or conceals
work. The relation is not exact, for millions knew that she was awakened
every morning by a mother who started her reciting her lines and kept
her at it all the way to the studio. It was just that Shirley’s work was
self-obliterating—a whole deck of cards vanished in the air, or rather
magically transmuted into $10,000 week worth of prepubescent games.

But there is an exact correspondence to Marx’s insight in the relation
between Shirley’s films and work. One probably could not find a depression
commodity more like a piece of Nottingham lace than a Shirley Temple film.
Her directors, writers, cameramen, composers and the rest were never written
about, never mentioned, except as witnesses to something Shirley said
or did. And the films they produced obliterate all traces of their craft.
They are consummate examples of minimal direction, invisible editing,
unobtrusive camerawork and musical scoring, and characterless dialogue.
Every burr or edge has been honed away, and the whole buffed to a high
finish.

There are other relations between love, money and work that I do not have
space to develop, and in some instances am not certain that I have grasped.
Let me, however, attempt to give some rigor to the analysis made so far.
I have argued that the ideology of charity was the creation of a class
intent upon motivating others to absorb the economic burdens imposed by
the depression. This privileged class regarded itself as possessed of
initiative, as self-made through hard work. And it saw in all governmental
plans for aid a potential subversion of the doctrine of initiative. Charity,
then, came to be characterized as the bulwark of initiative. Money was
a censored topic (for obvious reasons—Nelson Rockefeller today will
not allow reporters to question him about his wealth). But there were
clear implications that money as a charitable gift was benevolent, whereas
money in the form of a dole was destructive. Money, then, was ambivalent
and repressed, whereas charity and initiative were univalent and foregrounded.

In Shirley Temple’s films and biographies, through a slight but very important
displacement, charity appears as love and initiative as work. Both love
and work are abstracted from all social and psychological realities. They
have no causes; they are unmotivated. They appear in Shirley merely as
prodigious innate capacities, something like Merlin’s wisdom or Lancelot’s
strength; and they are magical in their powers—they can transform reality
and spontaneously create well-being and happiness. Money, in keeping with
its ambivalent nature, is subjected to two opposing operations. In Shirley’s
films and the depictions of real life attitudes toward money, it is censored
out of existence. It is less than destructive. It is nothing. But in an
opposing movement, found largely in Shirley’s biographies, money breaks
free and induces an inebriated fantasy that a Caliban would embrace, a
vision of gold descending from the heavens, a treasure produced from a
little girl’s joy and curls and laughter. This fantasy is removed from
all thought of effort or anxiety. One can simply sit back in his chair
and, like a Lotus-eater, let the drugged vision possess him.

But any attempt to further clarify these relations would probably be wrong-headed,
since it would argue for coherence where there is often only a muddled
interplay of the forces of censorship and obfuscation. It seems more appropriate
to let the whole discourse dissolve back into the existential mass of
depression history and Shirley and her films.
I will start it on its way by attacking the last point I made. I said
that Shirley’s films have no creators. This is untrue. The advertising
copy for her films tells us that Shirley Temple made them—sometime,
we must presume, between playing with her pet rabbits and eating her favorite
dish, canned peaches and ice cream. I also implied that many workers and
their children suffered in material ways during the depression. But President
Hoover wisely observed that the depression was “only a state of mind,” and Shirley’s life and work provide exemplary proof that Hoover was right.
And I hinted that cold cash might have been more desirable to a starving
man than a child’s warm touch. There is a perverse logic to this; but
the thought is materialistic and, above all, dehumanizing. Shirley’s films
never get into such Jesuitical quandaries. They keep the only authentic
solution constantly before our eyes: the transforming power of love.

And with those props knocked from beneath the specious edifice of my argument,
it shatters, expires and sinks beneath the dark tarn of history from which
it was fallaciously raised. But at the point where the last bubbles appear,
something bobs to the surface. It begins to rise in the air and to glow,
assuming the shape of a luminous being. And now, having attained full
power, it begins to flash off and on like a theater marquee, and its feet
begin to do little tap dance routines. It is Shirley Temple! Reborn. Released
from the rational spell cast upon her by those sorcerers, Freud and Marx.
And now we hear her voice announcing that the depression is over, that
it never existed, that it is ending endlessly in each and every of her
films, that these films are playing at our neighborhood theaters and that
we should come and see them, and that we must learn to love children and
to weep for them and open our hearts to them, that we mustn't hate rich
people because most of them are old and unhappy and unloved, that we should
learn to sing at our work and dance away our weariness, that anyone can
be an old sourpus about rickets and protein-deficiency but only a Shirley
Temple fan can laugh his pathology away.

And now that we have immersed ourselves in these egregious irrationalities
and utterly clogged the processes of thought, we once again should be
in the proper state of mind to see Shirley’s films, and perhaps to accept
her as simply and naively as she accepted her labors in Hollywood’s expedient
vineyards.